The advice and rantings of a Hollywood script reader tired of seeing screenwriters make the same mistakes, saving the world from bad writing one screenplay at a time. Learn what it takes to get your script past one of these mythical Gatekeepers.

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA is quite possibly the darkest show I've ever seen. I was a few weeks behind in completing this series and so while I was still mid-binge, I did my best to shut out the noise from pop culture sites that drop 13 recaps and even more thinkpieces within four days of the release of a Netflix show. I'm used to this by now and have developed my own method of getting through a new Netflix drop - no more than two episodes a night, and if two new shows drop close to each other, I tend to alternate back and forth. I like this method because it forces me to appreciate each ep on its own more.

The detriment is that during the instances where a binge takes a couple weeks, by the time I'm ready to talk about a show, the rest of the internet has moved on. There are a lot of reasons to appreciate the binge model, but I miss experiencing television at the same time as every other viewer. It made for more interesting conversation. Hell, it made for a longer, more in-depth conversation. That ship has long sailed, but usually, even if I was avoiding the thinkpieces, I at least had a vague awareness of their existence. With SABRINA, I finished the show with very little sense of what the wider discussion surrounding it was.

And with SABRINA, the most vocal protests I've seen have come from... the Satanic Church unhappy with their depiction? Really?

I'm not a fan of protesting TV scripted shows or campaigning for cancellations. If we're talking about people like Tucker Carlson who are putting genuinely harmful and dangerous ideas out there under the guise of "news," yes, by all means protest his sponsors and get his white supremacist ass off television. With scripted TV, the worst material has a habit of failing all on its own. Don't watch and it'll probably go away. Remember back when everyone thought STALKER was brutal and violent? Have you even thought about STALKER since that controversy?

The SABRINA situation shocks me mostly because of the total lack of reaction. Like many of my generations, I rolled my eyes when religious groups attacked Harry Potter for promoting Satanism, and every now and then you'd hear about fringe religious nutcases complaining that BUFFY's depiction of the occult was equally demonic. Both claims are pretty baseless to anyone who's actually consumed the material, but SABRINA isn't playing the witchcraft the same way - it's EXPLICITLY Satanic. The main arc of the first season deals with the fact that once she turns 16, the half-human, half-witch Sabrina must embrace her witch side and undergo a dark baptism where she pledges her obedience (and her virginity) to Satan himself.

Yep, there's no hiding behind fictional* demonic entities here. This is literally the Devil and our heroine as grown up as part of a coven that worships him. Sabrina as a few human friends but the most vivid personalities of the show are ALL IN on this Devil-worshipping.

*I consider myself pretty agnostic, so to be honest ALL of this stuff is fictional to me. New Testament, Crisis on Infinite Earths... it's all pretty much the same to me. But as the Devil is "real" to a large segment of the audience, I'm going with the flow for the sake of this piece. For me, the Devil is about as scary as Thanos.

Has there ever been a show where the "Good Guys" worry that the consequence of a teenage girl not selling herself to Satan will mean bad things for them? Sabrina's aunts Zelda and Hilda are depicted more sympathetically than some of the rest of the coven and spend half the season urging Sabrina to go through with her pact with the Devil. Using ACTUAL Satan as a player on the show should make the morality as black and white as possible, but the show seems to want us to perceive some shades of grey via the aunts' dilemma.

Pretend this was a grounded drama and instead of Literal Satan, Sabrina was being urged to give herself to the satanic Cult Leader. There's no ambiguity there, right? It's an evil act and any characters advocating for it must be evil. SABRINA takes that dynamic and makes it the drive of the aunts whom Sabrina loves dearly. It's an incredible subversion to anyone who remembers those characters on the Melissa Joan Hart series.

A late-season episode revolves around "The Feast of Feasts," where one member of the Coven is selected to be the Queen of the Feast. It's an honor that demands the selected Queen slit her own throat so that the coven may feast on her body. Sabrina finds the whole practice barbaric and is prepared to protest it, but the selected Queen, Prudence, is only too proud to be a part of this legacy. Through most of the episode, we're pretty sure we know where this is headed. Sabrina will take a Lisa Simpson-like stand against this archaic practice, people will begin to question this tradition (especially since we're told it's an old tradition being revived after a long dormancy), and in the end, humanity prevails - probably after a stirring speech from our heroine.

And for a while it looks like exactly what we'll get. The lottery is found to have been tainted, rigged. Sabrina makes an appeal that their leader simply outlaw the Feast, thereby facilitating a cover-up of this scandal. It's a situation where everyone saves face and Sabrina gets a "win," so it surely has to work, right?

Before they can put it into action at a meeting of a coven, one of the witches slits her own throat in genuinely disturbing fashion. Moments later, the entire coven goes ravenous, feeding on her as Sabrina can only watch with revulsion.

Like I said, DARK.

Then, the show somehow tops this bleakness with a finale where Sabrina is convinced that the only way she can get the power to save her friends and her entire town is to pledge herself to Satan of her own free will. She must sign her soul over to the Dark Lord and pledge to answer him when he calls. Sabrina does so and though she saves the town, it comes at a cost. By the end of the episode, she's strutting around with bleached blonde hair dressed like some of the more evil members of the coven who've spent the season representing everything Sabrina rejects.

It's as chilling an ending as seeing Captain Picard assimilated as one of the Borg. It's darker still because it's a selling of the soul that's stripped of all metaphor. She literally gave herself over to the Devil. There are altruistic motivations for doing so, but the result is that we're left with a Sabrina who's an agent of darkness.

Walter White: "I'm going to spend five years metaphorically selling my soul to the Devil for wealth and power."

Sabrina Spellman: "Lol, that's cute."

Last season I was shocked that Archie Comics was so willing to let RIVERDALE have Archie and Veronica get in deep with the mob. This makes that look like child's play. Without even debating whether it's good or bad on a story level that Sabrina sells her soul, it is straight-up the bleakest thing I've ever seen a series do, let alone one aimed at a teen audience.

While I'm on the subject of Dark TV, when I first tweeted some of these thoughts, it was clear that several of my readers immediately assumed that I was drawing a link between darkness and quality. I said the show was the darkest show I've ever seen - without any reference to its quality. From the replies I got, it was evident some respondents took it as an endorsement. I don't think saying something is "dark" automatically makes it good... nor do I think that alone makes something bad. In the end, it all comes down to story.

(Good example: in 13 REASONS WHY, I think Hannah's rape and her subsequent suicide in season one are also two of the darkest scenes I've seen on TV because there's emotional context to them. Contrast that with the bathroom sexual assault at the end of season 2, which is equally brutal, but creatively indefensible in a lot of ways.)

Time will tell if SABRINA can become a great show. It's willing to go places that few other shows have gone before, which shows bravery. As Sabrina explores the darkness next season, it will be discipline in story-telling that ultimately will determine how good a show it can become.

And still I wonder, what has exempted SABRINA from the typical moral panic that most other shows of its kind have faced? I don't think it's flying under the radar, so what makes that story of Satanism acceptable, while "fat-shaming" and suicide are extremely taboo?

Friday, November 23, 2018

(Note: this post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after using one of my links.)
If you've read my MasterClass reviews over the last couple years, but have been waiting for the right opportunity to buy, you might be interested in this Black Friday deal. MasterClass is doing a "Buy One, Gift One" sale. The promotion allows a new customer to purchase an All-Access Pass for $180 and receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge.

Also if a customer has already purchased a single class for $90, they can upgrade to the All-Access Pass for an additional $90 and still receive another All-Access Pass to give as a gift.

Each class runs about 5-6 hours and comes with a workbook and often valuable supplementary materials. For instance, if you take Shonda Rhimes's class, you get the series bible for Grey's Anatomy, the original 10-page pitch document for the series, and the pilot scripts for both Grey's and Scandal.

As I've said in my reviews, I consider the Ron Howard class on directing to be essential for anyone who wants to be a film director. I absolutely will guarantee its value. If there's someone in your life who might find this of value, definitely consider gifting them the All-Access Pass. To help you out, I've included links below to the reviews I've written for the writing and filmmaking-related classes, as well as links to the full roster if that helps convince you that this purchase will be worthwhile for your interests.

And best of all, if you use any of these links, I get a commission, so it's like giving a gift to a friend or family member AND me!

Again, you can purchase that All-Access Pass and get a free one to gift here.

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

As much as movie-going is supposed to be something of a shared experience, with a couple hundred people engaging with the same program at the same time, I've lately come to think that television is the true communal bonding experience while watching content. This is more anecdotal than scientific, but when I've discussed both movies and TV shows with people, it's more common to find their emotional bond is stronger to the TV experience than the film.

So because I enjoy turning my Twitter mentions into a mess for 24 hours at a time, last Monday I asked Twitter which pre-Twitter TV episodes or events would they have liked to have seen live-tweet reactions to the first time they aired. I figured it was a fun way to poll people on which TV moments made them lose their minds.

TV episode/event from the pre-Twitter era that you'd love to have seen live-tweet reactions to the first time it aired?

I can think of a dozen examples, but for this I'll go with: Carter and Lucy get stabbed on ER.

My personal pick was the end of the ER episode "Be Still My Heart," where Carter and Lucy are stabbed and left bleeding out in Curtain Area 3 while the rest of the staff parties outside, oblivious to their distress. It was a helluva cliffhanger for the following week. I was on Usenet when it first aired and I remember the ER newsgroup going nuts. This also kicked off a tradition of new members constantly asking "What was the song that played when Carter and Lucy got stabbed?" ("Battleflag.")

A lot of people responded that my moment would have been their pick too, recalling their own shock at the twist. There was a fair amount of appreciation for ER in general in the replies as many people also cited George Clooney's surprise cameo in Juliana Margulis's farewell episode, the moment where ER docs realize the patient hit by a train who they're trying to save is actually Omar Epps's character, med student Gant, Mark Greene's death, and the episode where Mark loses the pregnant woman.

Apparently I have a lot of ER fans who follow me. The fact that at its peak, the show was pulling in 30 million viewers a week might have something to do with it. Let me put this in perspective - last year's number one show was THE BIG BANG THEORY and it had just under 19 million viewers. Your average episode of NCIS pulls in 12 million viewers, and last season, THIS IS US averaged just over 11 million viewers.

Let's let that sink in, the "it drama" on TV has an audience of about 1/3 of ER's reach.

Some other frequently mentioned responses:
- Col. Blake's death on M*A*S*H
- the M*A*S*H finale
- Captain Picard assimilated by the Borg in the Season 3 cliffhanger
- Who Shot J.R?
- Who Shot Mr. Burns
- Seinfeld's "The Contest," which many people confoundingly remembered as "The Bet." Was this some kind of Mandela Effect?
- Lots of X-Files, particularly Scully's abduction, Mulder's abduction and Scully's pregnancy.
- Lots of Friends, especially Ross saying Rachel's name when he was marrying Emily and the finale.
- Will's breakdown over his father on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
- Alias's "Phase One," the Super Bowl episode that completely blew up the show. Sidney realizing she was missing two years was another frequent mention.
- Many Lost moments
- Dwayne crashing Whitley's wedding on A Different World.
- Joey/Pacey on Dawson's Creek.
- Melrose Place. Wig.
- Multiple Buffy and Angel moments, particularly Angel losing his soul and Buffy having to kill him. Her death and the musical were also brought up a lot.

Look at the shows mentioned there. With a few exceptions, those were Top 10 shows at a time when TV was pulling in a much larger audience. The result was that those big "WTF" moments were penetrating into the larger culture in a way that today's fractured viewing could never hope to achieve. Can you think of a single cliffhanger over the last couple years that had audiences as much on edge as "Who shot JR?" or the fate of the Enterprise against Locutus of Borg.

There was a fun sense of community in the replies. Someone would mention their dorm freaking out as Kimberly ripped off her wig to reveal a scar on MELROSE PLACE, prompting others to share their memories of watching the show live. They talked about how old they were, who they were with, who they had to talk to about it afterwards. It was a neat window into how so many of us had a shared point of reference, and then seeing how those experiences were the same or different from each other.

I tried to think about my biggest WTF television moments of the year and I honestly couldn't come up with anything that made any kind of comparable cultural impact. Three moments this season that genuinely stunned me were:

- From BARRY - the moment when Barry realizes his friend, his old army buddy, isn't going to be able to keep quite about their involvement in the deaths of some mobsters.

- From CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA - the outcome of "The Feast of Feasts," and I really feel like that's all I should say about it.

- From THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE - the ending of "The Bent-Neck Lady," where the true behind one of the hauntings snaps into grim, heart-breaking focus.

Of the three, the only one I felt any real community discussion about was THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, and even that was pretty sparse compared to what any of the above examples generated. There are two main reasons for this - one is the aforementioned drop in viewership. The other factor is that the streaming model means that we're no longer all experiencing content at the same time.

In 2000, if you wanted to watch ER, then chances are you had your ass in front of the TV at 10pm Thursday night. When you went into work or school the next day, everyone had seen it. It was fresh on their minds and the shared "Holy shit! Did you see that?" was a real thing. We don't have that any more. Even if you're watching network TV when it airs, there's a good chance some people around you are waiting to binge it, or are at least time-shifting via DVRs.

That aspect is becoming obsolete and it makes me sad we might be at the tail end of an era when there was such a strong shared experience. There's no show on TV that will have quite as large an impact as an ER, or a SEINFELD. In fifteen years, if someone drops a reference to BARRY on Twitter, there's no way it can elicit the same kind of knowing responses that the 500 "I, Ross, take thee, Rachel..." replies I got did.

That doesn't mean that television can't touch the individual in a personal way. I think in the last two or three years I've seen several shows that hit me emotionally and personally as much as anything I watched in the era of ER. The fragmenting of the audience means that as shows become more unique and specific, they are less broadly targeted. They appeal to niche tastes, which is how you end up with a show like AMERICAN VANDAL, that's as funny as THE SIMPSONS in its peak, but seen by a tiny pie slice of that audience.

Fifteen years from now, if someone were to ask the same question I did about shocking TV moments, how likely would the answer come back as "Who drew the dicks?" or "Who is the Turd Burgler?" The mega-hit TV show is gone and with it is our shared fury at moments like Ross insisting he and Rachel were on a break, our shared shock when Captain Picard became a Borg, our shared delight in seeing Mulder and Scully kiss.

The cultural touchstones are getting less broad, and until I got a day long demonstration of how so many people's formative TV passions overlapped, I don't think I appreciated what we're in the process of losing.

Monday, November 5, 2018

(Note: this post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after using one of my links.)
I wasn't sure what I'd be getting when I started Steve Martin's Masterclass "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy." There's Steve the Comedian, who also appears as Steve the Host and Steve the Talk Show Guest - the guy whose comic persona often plays as sincere insincerity. Would his course work be expressed via irony laden monologues and dry anecdotes?

Or would it be Steve Martin the Serious Artist, who once upset an audience that came to a public interview about his novel because he was discussing the art world (the subject of said novel) and not telling jokes or talking about his career. The audience was apparently so bored that they demanded - and got - refunds.

I saw Mr. Steve Martin's play BRIGHT STAR when it was in previews in San Diego a few years ago, and it too was a largely serious script, the tension broken only intermittently with one-liners that carried Martin's familiar voice. Between that and having read a few of his books, I knew that he didn't always write in the comic voice for which he was best known. I had a brief thought that peeking behind the curtain of Steve's carefully crafted comic voice might be a bit like dissecting a frog - impossible to do without killing it.

With that risk and possibility of total boredom awaiting me, I started the class.

I loved it. This is Steve Martin at his most charming. Not once did I feel him talking down to his audience and it's clear he had put an immense amount of thought into what he was saying. If Mamet was the erudite professor who loved to hear himself talk and Apatow was the shoot-from-the-hip guy who tells you informally how it is, Martin is the platonic ideal in-between them. He's laser-focused and gets right to the heart of every topic. That efficiency means he makes his point effectively and is able to move on to a broader variety of topics.

You might have noticed the class is called "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy," Not "Steve Martin Teaches Stand-Up Comedy," "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy Screenwriting," or "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy Performance." That's because Mr. Steve Martin doesn't limit his focus to just one of those topics, but encompasses many forms of comedy, including the three I cited.

From the beginning, Steve lays out his philosophy, telling people in the introduction that he doesn't believe people need to have a particular gift to be funny. In fact, he later says, "I had no talent," when he was starting out. He believes he became funny through the hard work of learning what was funny, learning how one particular construction of words could elicit a laugh while a similar but different configuration was less effective.

Several of the early lessons focus on gathering material, discovering one's comedic voice and how they express themselves. He talks about building a comic persona and dovetails into how stand-up comedy writing should be more than just set-up/punchline.

One thing that really stood out to me was how he distinguished himself from his contemporaries. Steve began in stand-up in the 70s, in a very political time. There were hundreds of comedians doing political humor, so he went non-political at a very political time. "Rather than be at the tail end of an old movement, I was at the front end of the new movement," he says. Going that way defined his comic persona and helped him hone the kinds of jokes that fit that. A comedian's best jokes can only be delivered by that person, he seems to believe, and he demonstrates this when he asks the audience to imagine signature bits delivered by different iconic comedians.

And it seems obvious when pointed out, but how often do you find yourself thinking about comedy that way? This led me to imagine Rodney Dangerfield delivering a George Carlin monologue. It probably wouldn't have worked and once you start thinking about the reasons why, everything Steve says makes sense. It's not even that Steve uses the Masterclass to tell you how to be Steve Martin. He tells you the mechanics behind how Steve Martin was built and does it in a way that lets you apply that process to you.

There's a lot of great, practical advice in how you perform for the stage. Considering Steve is a master of timing, it was incredibly valuable to hear him deconstruct the rhythm of a bit and then show us a clip of that bit in action.

Here's a good example of how Steve's precision made me think about something that never would have crossed my mind. One of his pet peeves is a comedian who starts the act with "How are we all doing tonight?" Steve says, "You've blown one of the most important moments of your show, which is 'It's beginning and who are you and how you define yourself.' Second, you've asked the audience to participate... which is almost the worst thing that can happen unless you're highly skilled in dealing with that."

He then runs a clip of his early standup act. Steve takes to the stage with a banjo as the audience applauds. He milks the applause as if he's embarrassed by it, playing it over the top so that we get, "ah, it's a bit pompous." He playfully flips the audience the bird, says "Thank you! I'll take that." Then after quickly fiddling with a water bottle (I assume in parody of how other comedians would), he says, "We're gonna start the show in just a few minutes... just waiting for the drugs to kick in." And you go, "Ah! THAT is Steve Martin."

There are a couple lessons that deal with writing screenplays and developing characters, and I would say that Martin's thoughts are at least as insightful and useful as those given by Sorkin, Rhimes and Mamet in other classes I've taken. (They go into greater depth, but the lessons certainly compliment each other.) There are even a few digressions into comedy acting for the screen, with one example being a FATHER OF THE BRIDE scene where Steve barely does anything, but because of how he played that, the audience imposed so much emotion and humor onto his blank slate.

I think these MasterClasses work best when the instructor is given some students to play off of and react to. Steve is given four comedy writers, some who have written stand-up pieces and some who have written sketches. He reads some of their pieces and as he does, suggest changes that always improve the act. For example, he'll note that a joke premise is promising, but is laser-focused when a later joke seems to slightly shift subjects in a way that confuses the audience. He's able to identify parts that are funny, but aren't helping the shape of the larger joke. It's like watching a master editor say "Cut this, move this up here. Change this word. Stop this joke here" and somehow it improves remarkably.

Notably, Steve does this in a way that's encouraging and always leaves the writer feeling good about the changes. They can tell he's made the joke better and done so in a way that as he continues through the act, you start hearing the jokes the way he does. He's quietly effective at not just pointing out what's wrong, but in teaching you how to make it right.

At this point, I have yet to encounter a truly bad MasterClass. They're all being judged against each other. Ron Howard's directing class remains for me the gold standard of what MasterClass should be, at least if you have any interest in directing.

If you're strictly about writing, Aaron Sorkin and Shonda Rhimes classes are both more in depth about TV writing specifically, but by their very nature, they're not too helpful when it comes to crafting comedy. Judd Apatow's course deals with comedy from a writing/directing standpoint, but I'd give Martin the edge over him simply because Martin covers performing and seeing him react to other students and writing he's not responsible for allows him to show how you can apply his expertise outside the control group of his own work.

Is it worth $90? I've justified the math for the other classes and this is on par with several of the better courses. For my money, the real value is in the All-Access Pass. For $180/year, or the cost of just two courses, you get access to ALL the courses. At that point, you can really amortize your investment. Doing six classes in a year brings that down to $30/class - not too shabby at all.

If you want my take, Ron Howard's directing class is essential and you can compliment it with any of the other writing classes, using my reviews as a guide towards what would appeal to you.

About Me

I've been reading scripts in Hollywood for over ten years. In that time I've read for Oscar-winning production companies, and one of the "Big Five" agencies, among others. I'm here to share what I've learned.... mostly because I'm sick of reading bad scripts.

I'm that guy you need to get past at the agencies and production companies; the first one in the office to read the script.